


fiction, future, and prediction

by dia_gonalley



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, also: welcome to depression land my guys, idk what this is rly, kind of inspired by parts of the song of achilles too thx, prose-y kinda ig
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-01
Updated: 2018-07-01
Packaged: 2019-06-01 01:01:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15131639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dia_gonalley/pseuds/dia_gonalley
Summary: "Steve Rogers always knew, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he wouldn’t make it to twenty-five."The story of two boys growing up in Brooklyn, New York, how they left, and how one came back.





	fiction, future, and prediction

**Author's Note:**

> "Where everything was fiction, future, and prediction/Now, where am I? My fading supply/  
> Did you get enough love, my little dove/Why do you cry?  
> And I'm sorry I left, but it was for the best/Though it never felt right.  
> My little Versailles"

Steve Rogers always knew, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he wouldn’t make it to twenty-five.

He was born premature, and by the tender age of eight he had coughed and rattled his way through influenza, scoliosis, polio, and the chicken pox. His momma worked three jobs to keep up with his trips to the doctor, and when she was gone, he sat alone and thought to himself about a lot of things. He wondered what his father was doing—his momma had whispered in his ear late at night how Domnall Rogers was out fighting the bad guys, flying across the world to make sure the evil people were stopped. He played doctor with his teddy—the poor bear was always sick. Neighbors reported hearing a voice through the walls. He was one of his favorite people, after all, out of his small world of Sarah Rogers, the doctor, and his favorite nurse.

When Steve was nine, he met James Barnes, fourth child of seven. There was a knock at the door one day while his momma was at the factory, and even though she had told him never to let in strangers, he peeped through the crack in the door. There was a boy outside, head down, kicking the carpet with worn-out play shoes, and that boy couldn’t hurt him, right, because the boy was only a little bit taller than him, and that meant someone to play with. So he opened the door, and the boy’s wide, friendly blue eyes locked onto his face. Less than a second passed before the boy’s face lit up with a grin, and Steve learned that Bucky (because Bucky was better than boring old James) could charm the pants off whoever he wanted. 

When Steve was twelve, he caught influenza, and he knew for sure he wouldn’t get out of that dingy beige hospital room. His momma wasn’t there. Her boss had told her that if she didn’t come that day she couldn’t come back, and the hospital was more money than they paid to live in their boxy little apartment for half a year. But Bucky was, and as Steve’s vision grew hazy, he could see his best friend’s outline, feel his hand gripping Steve’s arm, hear his pleading tone but not his words. When he woke up, Bucky was there, snoring, after two days of almost falling asleep standing up waiting to hear news. When he laughed at the sight, Bucky started awake, and Steve saw the tears in his eyes, and that same huge smile that Bucky had when they had first met.

When Steve was fourteen, he got in his first fight. He was walking behind the grocery store to throw away some trash when he saw two boys talking to a girl who had the same expression as he did when the doctor came around with a big needle. Steve hated those damn needles, and right then, he hated those boys too. He walked right up and started asking them questions. By the time those boys finally got distracted, Steve ended up with a black eye, a broken rib, and cuts and bruises everywhere. His momma, rightfully, freaked out. Buck just raised an eyebrow and told him not to go too far away from then on.

When they were fifteen, Bucky got his first girlfriend, and he told stories about her warm skin and soft lips. Steve started staying at home more often. There were fewer fights that way, and anyways, his momma liked it better that way—she said it kept his lungs safe. But Bucky always came home at the end of the day, and made sure Steve knew he was still Bucky’s number one. 

When Steve was eighteen, his momma caught influenza. But she was getting older, and working three jobs for almost twenty years cost her in the end. Steve spent his first ever paycheck on a suit jacket and flowers to put on a little headstone with a cross on the top.

-

Steve and Bucky moved in together. Bucky still had his girlfriends, and Steve still picked a fight with anything with a mouth, but things were different now. Bucky had a dream, and they both knew it. White picket fence, pretty wife, four kids. But every day, Steve wondered if it would be his last. He had never really thought about what he wanted when he grew up. In all honesty, he had never thought he would make it that far. So he lived day by day, fighting, laughing, going out with Bucky, even if it was just to humor him.

They only went to a nightclub once. Flying on the high of pay day, they burst through the doors onto the dance floor. With every drink, the two felt warmer and fuzzier. Steve leaned against the bar, eyes locked on Bucky who, even while dancing with a pretty girl’s hand in his, still stared back with that same steely blue gaze. It was even stronger with alcohol.

Bucky dropped the girl’s hand.

The two stumbled through the busy streets of Brooklyn on a Friday night, laughing all the way home at Steve’s stupid jokes. They could barely stand up straight. Steve blinked, and they were home, facing each other, two deer locked in each other’s headlights. Then their breath touched, then their lips, and the liquor in their system pushed them into a bed. Hands on bodies, breath caught, moans, stillness. 

Steve woke up the next morning with his head pounding on Bucky’s worn-out mattress, and before the other boy could wake up, he pulled on his shirt and walked back over to his own bed.

The next day, Steve signed up to join the army.

When Bucky found out, he was furious. The two didn’t speak for three days. But when the notice came back that “Steven Grant Rogers does not meet the U. S. Army’s health standards,” he comforted his friend anyways. Steve tried again and again, and Bucky came to realize they wouldn’t let him in, and seemed guilty for feeling happy.

In the meantime, they lived the best lives two poor young men in a hard part of Brooklyn could. They went to the carnival. They watched movies. They went dancing with Buck’s “lady friends”. They made sure Steve was still breathing fine.

It was almost ironic. Steve had applied for the army seven times, and gotten rejected every one. But he came home one day to find Bucky curled up on their little couch, and a letter open on the table stating that “Mr. James Barnes has been chosen to serve our country in Regiment No. 107”. Seven rejections, but Bucky had been plucked from his life in one shot. Steve felt a cold weight settle in his chest. He sat down on the couch and held Bucky in a hug, barely getting his arms around as they mourned for the dreams they wanted and the shit they got instead.

Everyone around Steve and Bucky would have thought their lives went back to normal. But the friends were both counting the days. Twenty-one more days of laughing. Seventeen more days of bad dock food. Eight more days of seeing the other’s face. 

On Bucky’s last day, he winked at Steve, and said that they were going to the future. They went to the carnival, each arm in arm with a girl who obviously liked the same one more than the other. A man was showing how a flying car would work when Steve saw a recruitment station. He knew it had to be a sign, those places would take anyone! And when they stamped a regiment number on his form, he ran home beaming. He burst into the apartment only to find Bucky’s suitcase gone, and a new sketchbook on the kitchen table next to a little note saying he would write.

It felt as though the world had stopped spinning. 

He hadn’t even gotten a chance to say goodbye.

-

Ms. Peggy Carter wore lipstick the color of blood and high heels in the mud, but something about the look in her eyes reminded him of Buck. 

He jumped the hurdles and climbed the ropes and ran the miles, scared of losing oxygen but more scared of having to go back to their two-person apartment by himself. He never really knew why he jumped on the grenade. They told him it was because he was a good man, but who knows? Maybe he’d simply rather die than go home. 

When the doctor told him what they planned to do, he accepted. In Steve’s head, there was no way to lose. They clinked glasses in silence.

The lab brought back every time he’d gone to the hospital and thought he wouldn’t come back out. And those damn needles, big and thick and dripping with god-knows-what concoction of chemicals. They closed the doors. 

Maybe the electricity killed him and brought him back in a new body. But when Steve woke up, he could breathe right and stand up straight and kick his right knee in a way he hadn’t been able to since he was four. And for the first time in his life, he chanced the thought that, maybe, he could live a little longer.

The tour was the worst part. He could do everything he’d dreamed of when he was younger, but they stuck him up onstage to entertain the troops, the ones he should have been fighting alongside. Every night, he got up onstage. Read off his shield and, eventually, from memory about how buying war bonds was the key to victory! Stage punched Hitler in the face. Wave to the sullen soldiers. Go to his train car and punch a bag until his knuckles bled.

Weeks passed like this, day after day after day. Until one gloomy day camped out in rainy southern Italy, when Steve heard a passing rumor that a regiment had been captured by HYDRA. When he learned it was 107, he was terrified, both for Buck and for how excited he was by the prospect of fighting for him.

Somehow, Steve had never considered that anything would change between him and Bucky. It had always just been the two of them, for better or for worse. But when Steve hopped the fence and turned corners and dodged bullets to free the soldiers, he found Bucky on a cold metal table, looking smaller than Steve had ever seen him. And when Bucky opened his eyes, the first thing out of his mouth was how Steve was taller. And at that moment, Steve realized he didn’t have an excuse to make Bucky stick around anymore. He didn’t need protection; the tables had turned in a way neither of them could have expected. 

But even as Red Skull’s face was peeling off his bones, Bucky was making jokes. They escaped with the rest of the soldiers as the base exploded behind them, and for the first time since Bucky had left, the world went back to the way it had been before. As they marched back into camp, Steve finally felt like a damn hero.

Reveling in their victory, the two went to the bar with the rest of the soldiers, forgetting their rules. Steve was flushed and grinning wide. Bucky mumbled something about ‘the outfit’. But then Peggy showed up in that red dress, and Steve realized he had to choose. 

Even many years later, he was never sure.

-

Steve had forgotten about Coney Island. He thought Bucky had too. They landed on the train in silence, and as soon as Steve stepped out, the doors closed. Looking back, Steve must have killed that soldier in an instant to get back to Buck. One had “had him on the ropes,” but it was backwards, reversed. 

When the side of the train opened, Steve felt time slow until every second was an hour. He was knocking down men. Shots were coming from every side. Bucky was holding his shield. The last man fell.

Bucky slipped.  
Steve ran to the edge of the train, stretched out his arm further and further and further. But he grabbed at where Bucky’s hand had been seconds earlier, before the metal pipe Bucky had been hanging from had snapped without warning. James Barnes fell hundreds of miles into a snowy mountain ravine, and the sound of his scream echoed all the way down. 

And this time, the merciless world kept turning, in spite of the fact that its best creation had just taken his final breath.

-

A part of Steve Rogers broke that day. Something was unmistakably, irreplacably different. A certain light behind his eyes had died, the one that always sparkled with laughter when Bucky told a joke.

He read and reread the sentences Bucky had scrawled in his sketchbook before he left, never to return to the noisy, brown-walled one-bedroom in Brooklyn. 

_Dear Stevie,_  
I know when you’re reading this, I’ll be gone. I’mma come back, though. ‘Know I promised I’d wait ‘till you got here, but you know I like thinkin’ of you at home sittin’ pretty waitin’ for me. But I’mma come back, and when I do, you’ve gotta bring some good food home, ok?  
We’re going to the future, pal. I love you.  
-Buck 

Steve squeezed his eyes shut and vowed to kill every damn Nazi on the planet.

-

He flew onto the plane to capture Red Skull. But Red Skull vanished, was drawn away by a beam of light, and Steve knew it wasn’t his problem anymore. What was his problem, however, was the carrier full of bombs headed for New York City. 

Peggy came on the line. They both knew there wasn’t enough time. He apologized for missing their dance. She tried to talk him out of it, but it was his choice.

His choice. 

Steve drew in a breath, and tipped the controller down.

How damn poetic, that he was falling into icy terrain where no one would ever be able to find him. As his stomach flew into his throat, he kept his eyes ahead. 

At least they would remember his name. Captain America, the no-longer-living legend who sacrificed himself to save his country. He would be a hero. 

He got up and, with a grim finality, laid down underneath a window, heart pounding.

But what about Bucky? What about the one who died too soon to fall with him? The one who laughed by his side and cried in his arms, whose heart beat with the same rhythm? What about the boy who saved Steve’s life, made him wake up in the morning, loved him every damn day with everything he had in him?

Steve closed his eyes and prayed they remembered the lover, not the fighter.

The plane hit the water.

-

He woke up in a hospital bed, baseball game on the radio. The familiar crackle caught him off guard, and his head jerked up as the door opened to a woman. She was so close to Peggy, so damn close he simply wanted to believe it was her, but his gut instinct was on high alert. A cheer came from the radio, but for some reason it sounded like the same cheer as in 1941, the one with Buck in the nosebleeds. It was almost right. Almost, which made it very, very wrong.

Steve jumped up and ran.

He ran out of the room, and he wasn’t in a hospital, but a giant warehouse with cords and beeps and whirring everywhere, and anyone who saw him seemed to jump, so he didn’t stop to look around. He just kept running, out the door and down the street until a sign caught his eye, the brightest pink he had ever seen. And as soon as he noticed that sign, another jumped out at him, then another, then another, until he was surrounded by bright colors and flashing lights and billboards miles high, and all Steve could do was turn in awe and fright as cars formed a circle around him. 

They told him it was the future. He had made it.

Fate really was a bitch.

_We’re goin’ to the future, pal. I love you._

Steve Rogers, who wasn’t supposed to get to twenty-five, was ninety-four years old.

But the boy who was supposed to take him there never made it to twenty-three.


End file.
